Sampled-Data Interaction Driven Formation Control for Multiple Heterogeneous Vehicles Systems in Air–Ground Coordination

This paper investigates the formation control problem for a class of multiple heterogeneous vehicles systems (MHVSs) in air-ground coordination, where the information interaction between vehicles is required to be in a sampled rather than continuous style. Specifically, the MHVSs consist of wheeled unmanned robots and quadcopters, possessing the cross-domain advantage of air-ground coordination. Owing to heterogeneous dynamics and constrained communication resources in MHVSs, the formation protocol design poses significant challenges. Skillfully integrating the reference trajectory method, fixed-time control method, and backstepping technique, a novel sampled-data formation control protocol is developed, and the protocol only involves the virtual information interaction among vehicles. Then, using the Lyapunov functional method, it is proven that the formation control objective can be achieved by the developed protocol. Finally, we validate the theoretical results of this paper through a numerical simulation.